Outdoor Decorating Ideas for the Christmas Season
Everyone is familiar with the longstanding practice of putting up outdoor Christmas lights around their homes. This is still a great way to decorate the exterior of a home however our challenge is to go beyond the usual and add some delightful twists to your decorating efforts.
A string of colored lights wrapped around the pine tree in the front yard looks great. You now however have the chance to take advantage of modern technology. Add a holographic snowman to your front-lawn and delight the neighbors and yourself. These simple devices will project a snowman image in 3-D anywhere you would like. You can walk all around your display and see a snowman in Christmas colors.
Take the next step and add motion to your Christmas scene. Moving light shows that project Christmas-themed images can be anything from simple colored lights to a complete video. You can light up an outdoor bush or project a scene onto a large garage door. You can make the shadows dance under the eaves or even twinkle the angel decoration on the top of the house.
Add real objects to your light display and flesh out the decorations to look great this Christmas.
The Nativity scene is a Christmas favorite and still works well in many decorating schemes. Spruce it up a little by adding some spray-on snow if you don't have snow around you at Christmas time. You can also add some realistic touches by putting down small clumps of straw inside and outside the manger.
Mail boxes provide the perfect opportunity to exercise your creativity. You can go for traditional ribbons and bows or spruce it up with decorative red and gold-colored paints. You can even go a little more abstract and design a decorative wreath made from non-traditional materials. An icy-crystal look can be achieved by using white wire hangers and shiny translucent plastic. Place a white or colored light in the centre of the wreath and hang it from the mail box. You can run the wire down the mail box pole and along a thin extension cord to the lawn lights, or you can use a solar-powered light that stores up energy from the sun during the day and releases it at night.
If you have trees or bushes in the front yard they give you plenty of objects to decorate in traditional or unusual ways. Strings of lights work fine. Faux-icicles are very popular at the moment. You can be creative and use some miniature figurines to make your design unique. Tiny figures from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas or similar Christmas shows are an idea. You could also sprinkle the foliage with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs carrying out their characteristic actions.
Use the lawn itself as a huge canvas. Light strings, solar lights in the shape of a wreath, some special glow-in-the-dark paint of the type that washes away after a few weeks. The list of possibilities to decorate your home this Christmas is bound only by your imagination. |
